I’m in the midst of a move that ends an eight-year experiment for me.
Eight years ago I decided that I’d best find out what it was like to live in Vancouver’s East End, because a decade from then, I could conceivably be living there. So I’d better find out what to expect.
Well, I’ve had a very enjoyable stay there, which I’ll leave for another time.
I’m now living in the same building as Kathleen, different apartments. No more 45-minute commutes both ways. No more buses ending at midnight and walking six miles home.
But at the same time what I never suspected was that I was in fact cocooning in my artist’s digs in the Downtown Eastside. I was closed off from all outside society, living at the end of a hall that no one went down.
My neighbors never interrupted me and building management left me alone. It was the perfect environment to work for years in journalism without any competing influences or distractions.
And now it needs to end for many reasons. I need to come out into the outside world. And what a perfect way of breaking me in gently than locating me to the second highest floor in the complex so I need to go down the elevator with my neighbors fourteen floors. That alone to an introvert, used to hiding in his building and walling himself in for concentration, is a tremendous wake-up call.
The move had me see so many things, as moves do. One of them is that it’s crystal-clear to me that I need to carry out a wholesale psychological shift, because of the changing nature of my work, and my new outside surroundings are just a reflection of it.
Until now, I’ve made a career out of being “a difficult person.” Those are wonderful qualities when we’re standing up to the cabal. Make it difficult for them. Turn up the heat. But they aren’t wonderful and endearing qualities on this next leg of the journey.
I’m calling upon myself to begin manifesting an “easy-going nature.” That’s my Christmas gift to myself.
Meanwhile I have boxes all around me. Everything’s in an uproar. And yet everything just took a really-wonderful turn.